BlueHost Review – How Reliable is BlueHost as a Shared Host?

BlueHost is a very, and I mean very popular name in the web hosting space — if it's not the most popular shared hosting company on Earth. But, as is the case with many other fields other than web hosting, the most popular option isn't necessarily the best one in terms of quality. Is this true for BlueHost as well? After reviewing InMotion Hosting, I decided to find that out in this unforgiving BlueHost review.

Introduction to BlueHost

​BlueHost first started operating in 1996, primarily offering shared hosting services. It was founded by Matt Heaton, who was the CEO from 1996-2011. In 2010, amidst much controversy and speculation, EIG (Endurance International Group) acquired BlueHost. Since 2011, Dan Handy operates as the CEO of the company.

BlueHost specializes in shared hosting to this date, but they’ve now started offering additional types of hosting like VPS, dedicated servers, and managed WordPress hosting. BlueHost claims to host over 2 million websites worldwide, making them one of the top hosting companies on the basis of hosted sites volume.​

The BlueHost Advantages

BlueHost have been around in the shared hosting game since more than 20 years since they were originally founded in 1996. Not only have they managed to stick around all these years while becoming one of the most well-known shared hosts worldwide, they've also successfully managed to keep their quality of service consistent through all these years, while overcoming a few minor hiccups along the way, like aggressive CPU-throttling and the likes.

BlueHost is your typical budget-friendly web host that offers a standard cPanel and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) setup for people who’re not looking for too many features. With that in mind, let’s take a look at what all features that they have on offer:

Free, unlimited email accounts for the top-end plan. Email storage is within your total account storage. There are some limits as to how many emails in an hour you can send, so if your site is demanding in terms of sending emails, use some third party solutions like EmailOctopus.

Hassle-free scalability allows you to upgrade your plan to a VPS or a dedicated server without having to face the hassles of moving your website.

Account isolation technology isolates accounts having websites that consume too much resources, to ensure that the overall performance of the server doesn’t degrade and affect all customer sites on that server.

Speed - Testing Load Times

In my testing, I've found BlueHost's servers to be fairly fast. It's certainly not the fastest among all shared hosts, neither does it manage to make the test site load under 500ms unlike InMotion Hosting, but at that entry-level price point, the performance is more than you'd expect. Not only the total page load time, the initial server response time (<300 ms on average) was pretty impressive for a shared host, too.

It seems like BlueHost have upgraded their server hardware greatly and thereby improving performance for the end-user. This is good to know, considering they were at one point in the past accused of overselling and overcrowding their servers.

Uptime Stats

In my testing period with BlueHost, the test site experienced just a single instance of downtime, and that was for 2 minutes. This is really impressive for a cheap shared host. So, in short, uptime shouldn't be an issue if you decide to host your site on BlueHost's platform.

Price – BlueHost's Shared Plans Compared

BlueHost's shared hosting plans are very competitively priced. The plans mainly vary based on the number of add-on domains (i.e. the number of unique websites) that you can host on them. BlueHost currently has 3 different shared hosting plans, and they are as follows:

Their Basic plan, coming in at $3.49/mo is the most popular one with beginners. It gives you the option to host only one unique domain. It's understandable because not everyone has multiple websites to host.

Their mid-range plan, Plus, costing $5.95/mo, is the most value for money one out of the lot. It allows you to host an unlimited number of websites, with no storage or bandwidth limits whatsoever.

​Their highest offering is called Pro,and it is priced at $13.95/mo, which is more than a shared hosting customer usually spends. It comes with a dedicated IP, an SSL certificate bundled-in, a complimentary subscription of their optional SiteBackupPro service, and a few other perks. It offers slightly more resource usage than the other two plans, which allows you to keep hosting your site on a shared platform even when it outgrows their entry-level and mid-range plans.

For most users, the Plus, or even the Basic plan would be more than sufficient, as even any serious blogger or webmaster hardly gets time to handle more than a couple of sites.​ For the more hard-core users out there, however, BlueHost has the Pro plan on offer.

Exclusive BlueHost Coupon for 2016

BlueHost usually doesn't like offering too much discount to its users, as the default prices are already very competitive. I still managed to get hold of an BlueHost discount link that offers dynamic discounts for different plans of BlueHost. You just need to click the button below, and your discount will be activated and will work for a month.

Support

BlueHost are one of the few web hosts that offer 24x7 phone, live-chat and email support. I've found their support department to be adequate at the very least, when it comes to answering general tech queries or looking up for site-specific issues.

The support response times aren't that impressive, however, and they varied quite a bit, from 10 minutes to an hour. The first response has been an auto-generated response in quite a few cases, too.

BlueHost couldn't remind me that they're actually a very cheap shared host when I tested out the other parts of their overall service, but support was an exception. I really missed the efficient, fast, 100% human-powered support that hosts like InMotion Hosting provide.

Concluding this BlueHost Review

By the looks of it, this review has already become the most comprehensive BlueHost review on the internet. Since I’m very passionate about web hosting, I could go all day about different aspects of it. But since this has already become so long, I’d like to quickly conclude this review.

BlueHost's hosting ﻿plans are quite cheap compared to most of their competitors. But apart from the not-so-great support department, I found BlueHost to be decent in most other aspects.

One negative point to consider is the limited add-on domains for their most basic plan. But that probably wouldn't concern the target audience (new bloggers / webmasters who're just starting their web journeys) much.

Overall, ​BlueHost is a decent host for the money, especially. I would definitely give them a try if I were looking for a reliable, feature-packed, aggressively priced shared web host without wanting to know too much about the technical titbits that go behind hosting a website.

If you're looking for a higher-priced, better alternative, however, I'd definitely recommend InMotion Hosting (a tad bit pricier) without thinking twice. Because they offer everything that BlueHost does, and only perform even better in most aspects.​

Additional Information

Here are some additional information that aren’t directly related to BlueHost itself, but rather about a few things about shared web hosting and some services that BlueHost offers and their common, tricky consequences.

Click to Expand

Unlimited Everything – The Reality

One of the major features of BlueHost that attract newbies the most is the promise of, literally, unlimited everything, starting from their Plus plan. Sure, you can provide an option for people to host as many domains as they like since there’ll always be a practical limit for that, as people only have limited money to purchase those domains in the first place. But, things like disk space? How can a company offer unlimited disk space? Truth: they can’t. Here’s a very logical explanation by Michael Denney, on how people are tricked by these ‘unlimited everything’ marketing gimmicks:

Just tell them that if they go down to their local computer part store or even an online vendor and they find a legitimate “unlimited” hard drive, that you’ll provide them free hosting for life 🙂 You could also simply state that unlimited space and transfer only exists for those with an unlimited budget, which is a bit snarky. Hardware has physical limits and as such any plan (“limited” or “unlimited”) is going to have hard limits whether they’re clearly defined for the end user or not. It’s a simple concept however it seems a lot of people have a hard time understanding it. You are generally bound by 101 types of complications of their Terms of Service (ToS) or Fair Usage Policy (FUP) that do the job of not letting you consume much resources, well.

I’ve advised people in the past not to make the same mistakes that most beginners do while choosing their first host — but people still keep repeating the same old mistakes. This doesn’t have a very direct relation with BlueHost itself, as it’s not the only company offering such unlimited resources. In fact, many do. But the reason why I included that bit is that BlueHost is one of the top web hosts (by popularity) in the world, and if you’re reading this review, and go ahead with a purchase over on BlueHost, realize that unlimited isn’t really unlimited, then you’ll finally come back to blame me.

BlueHost Review - Our Rating of BlueHost

Speed

Features

Uptime

Support

Security & Reliability

Price

Summary

BlueHost is a decent shared hosting company for the money. It's ideal for beginners due to the easy-to-use cPanel interface and generally fast, reliable servers. While their support department aren't really one of the best in the business, but at that price, it's totally justified. Overall, BlueHost is a value for money web host.

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Rohit Palit

I'm a 18 years old Inbound Marketing Consultant based out of Kolkata, India. I'm a technical SEO fanatic. I'm also interested in web hosting and WordPress sites. Want my help for your next project?
Connect with me on - My Personal Site, Google+, Facebook & Twitter.

bharathkumaran

Hi. This bluehost review is helpful to me. i seen many features in this hosting service. now, my mind is to try this hosting service.

Lorrie

Bluehost is a SCAM. Why? Because when you cancel and delete your account they continue to bill you for additional products such as $24 for Site Lock service and they do not provide nor show any options online to delete or cancel it. YOU HAVE TO CALL THEM AND THEY STOP THE AUTO RENEWAL BY REMOVING YOUR CREDIT CARD INFO. Just to remind you guys, this is a website hosting company that does not allow you to fully cancel services ONLINE and misleads you into thinking the account is actually DELETED and CANCELLED. RIPOFF SCAMMERS. STAY AWAY!!!

Plati

Thank you for your review. Very eloquently written. 🙂

I however feel compelled to stick up for Bluehost’s Support, as it is the one area that you have [albeit moderately] criticised. As a new [relatively un-tech savvy] website owner looking to establish my first site, I turned to bluehost as my first step on the rung with their shared hosting package.

During my first few weeks, I encountered five major issues [all my fault] that for me [as an inexperienced new webmaster] were game-breaking ones, which left me feeling lost and completely out of my depth, not knowing how I was ever going to get my site working properly.

All five times I used Bluehost’s excellent 24 hour live chat support system, to help me out of my seemingly insurmountable situations. On each occasion, my support request was answered by a real person, and in under a minute! And three of these were in the early hours of the morning.

I cannot speak highly enough of the support I received. The chat service itself is wonderful in the sense that going by many of the staff usernames, they were likely working from a call centre on the subcontinent, which as many will understand, can make telephone communication very difficult in trying to understand different accents. This adds more frustration to the levels you already had from breaking your website. 😉 But with Bluehost 24 hour chat support, that problem is eliminated, as it is all text based.

All of their support staff I’ve dealt with have been extremely helpful, friendly and professional at all times. And endlessly patient with my untechnical self. On one occasion I did something that seemed a catastrophic mistake, as my site was broken, so I reached out for their support. Having been answered in around 20 seconds, and explained my issues, the kindly staff member asked me to hold on for a few minutes whilst they checked my site — returned and said “try it again now” — and to my delights, they had completely fixed it for me in about ten minutes! I expected them to come back to me and guide me through all manner of difficult things I’d have to do to fix it, but no, they just did it for me, jjust like that.

I am very grateful for Bluehost’s most excellent Support service, and give them my highest recommendations to anyone like me, who is just starting out, and needs a bit of quality and patient support whilst finding our feet in the world of web hosting.

Bluehost is the worst webhosting I have ever come across. They will just deactivate your account without notification or warning. Their server goes down way more than you expect. You may not even know they have deactivated your account or you website is no more working until you try to login. If you sell a lot per day, you will lose a lot of money. If you are unlucky, Google will just derank you from the first page and you lose all you traffics.

I have finally decided to move out from Bluehost after a big company I wanted to promote paid my website a visit and found out that it was down and then they rejected my application.

If you are really serious about your business I will advise you to stay as far away as you can from Bluehost.

I have a basic website up with blueHost, its a shared domain with one other website. The load time on the website is disgusting simply disgusting. Its a basic WordPress website so far, but literally the website takes 1 minute 40 seconds to load completely. It opens at about 20 seconds in with my mobile data but if I even try to connect over wi-fi the connection just times out! Horribly slow.

About Me

My name is Rohit Palit, and I'm a 19 years old SEO geek. I'm a blogger and a passionate web entrepreneur. Web hosting is one of my passions, so I spend a lot of time testing different hosts for performance, support and uptime to publish brutally honest reviews of them.

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